


Big Sky Country Blues

by wetheformidables



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 12:55:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20436383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wetheformidables/pseuds/wetheformidables
Summary: Michael makes a small life for himself in Montana.





	Big Sky Country Blues

**Author's Note:**

> I read somewhere recently writers should embrace an artistic nemesis, and make no mistake Jennie Urman Synder is mine - though I have her and Season 5 to thank for the inspiration to rewrite the end of Michael's story because in my mind he grieves as deeply, and this is only the beginning :)
> 
> Posted this drabble on Tumblr and may be part of a longer fic if I get around to writing properly. For now, it lives in my brain and phone notes but here's to our favorite cowboy detective who deserves to help take down a drug lord and make a lot of good progress in therapy!

In the morning, he wonders what Charlie would do if he told her about the dream he had. The one where I knocked you up and we stumbled our way to a shotgun wedding but I think I loved you.

God. She would actually shoot him this time and never get those prize chickens, then where would they be? 

Well. Seeing they are at the odd hello. Not really anywhere. Mending fences as he works to pay off this strange debt and mend fences. They are people with an unsteady peace and not much to say to each other. All feathers and forced how-about-this-weather-we’ve-been-havings. Hardly matching plaid and matrimony dreamed up in a coffeeshop in…Miami? Her shirt pulled taut over a belly swollen like a hurt, and are pregnant women allowed to drink coffee? Jane never did. Also why was his mother there…at the cubano truck? Passing the phone to him, wait, and why was Jane there?

He can’t remember in that maddening way of dreams, to grow faint by daylight, small. He rubs his chin, wondering if it’s high time he tried growing a beard again. Jane would hate that. At the thought of her, he feels all the little broken parts of him, shards just under the skin.

That pain grows fainter too by daylight. When there is a ranch to work, with horse stalls to muck and sun on his neck, everything else must shrivel up. But under wide Montana skies, they find their way into his sleep. He tries to remembers her little details. The fear that he is forgetting lives beneath his ribs, because if he does, who will remember the weight of her head on his shoulder? Will she?

He opens his eyes to see the manuscript on the table near the door. Their story, the we-belong-together-and-I’ll-never-stop-believing-that, told lovingly, but with an end. _And for as long as Michael lived, until he drew his very last breath, he never did._

Do you still love her? Charlie asked in his dream.

Oh, of course, because loving her led me to you.

“God, could you imagine?” Michael laughs, and Bo lifts his head, startled. “You’re right. We are never mentioning this to anyone.”

There is a knock on the door and he is half afraid to have summoned Charlie and her wrath for dreaming of her against his will. But when he opens the door, Rick is already halfway back to his mount. “There’s a call for you at the ranch.”

“Must be pretty important for you to come all the way up here, or were you only looking for an excuse to see me?”

Rick shakes his head. “I liked you better when you talked less.”

Michael barrels after the foreman’s horse, down the hill at a jaunt, Bo at his heel. His mother knows to wait for him to call as days here can become nights when the cows get out. (He begins to suspect Rick.) He may not be dead but he is to Billy, and Dad hears what he needs from Mom. So, who else but…? 

“Hello,” he says, a little hope in his voice and he bites his tongue. The voice at the end of the line is familiar, the only other person he thought of as a partner in that old life.

“Rose escaped,” Dennis says, and Michael feels as though he is falling, the shards of himself becoming smaller still.


End file.
